The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) on Wednesday launched an action plan to develop Taiwan’s gerontechnology industry, which it said is designed to meet the needs of a super-aged society.
With 21 percent of Taiwan’s population expected to be aged 65 or older by 2026, the government since March last year has been meeting with experts from agencies, industries, academia and the medical field to discuss the issue and planned response measures.
Gerontechnology — an emerging field that uses technology to meet the care and quality-of-life needs of elderly people — has been guiding many countries’ responses to aging societies, said Lin Ming-jen (林明仁), deputy executive secretary of the council’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and a professor of economics at National Taiwan University.
Photo: Wu Po-hsuan, Taipei Times
Taiwan’s action plan for the gerontechnology industry is a joint undertaking of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Culture and the Council of Indigenous Peoples, NSTC Minister Wu Tsung-tsong (吳政忠) told a launch event on Wednesday.
The plan would attend to the needs of elderly people and stimulate the development of related industries in Taiwan, as smart and other new technologies are expected to be deployed, with the government serving as a platform, Wu said.
This would help empower elderly people and enhance their quality of life, including participation in social activities, healthcare and their caregivers’ needs, he said.
Minister Without Portfolio Lin Wan-i (林萬億) said that about 21 percent of Taiwan’s population would be 65 or older by 2026, with the figure reaching 28 percent in 2036, making the country an “ultra-aged society,” a title that only Japan has.
“The silver economy is not only about long-term care, which is only needed by 13.3 percent of elderly people [in Taiwan]; we also want to make use of new technologies to help the other 86.7 percent live independently with good quality of life,” Lin Wan-i said.
“Digital empowerment, for instance, is one of the important aspects regarding how elderly people can remain connected to society,” he said, adding that narrowing the inter-generational digital gap is crucial to social inclusion.
“What elderly people need is more than a bigger keyboard on their mobile phones,” said Liu Tsu-hwie (劉祖惠), a director at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. “In terms of digital empowerment, our job is to help mediate between industry — where young people are the main developers — and the needs of elderly people.”
Another aim is to enhance the efficacy of caregivers with smart technologies and improve the quality of life for elderly people by localizing the care industry and expanding the care network, Lin Min-jen said.
Policies to respond to an aged society’s needs proposed in the US, Japan and South Korea are based on the idea of changing the perspective from treating elderly people as passive recipients of care to empowering them with the help of new technologies, he said.
A 2019 US report titled Emerging Technologies to Support an Aging Population identifies a range of functional capabilities and aspects that emerging technologies have the potential to improve, including communications and social connectivity, mobility, access to healthcare, cognition, and reducing caregivers’ emotional and economic stress, he said.
There were about 760 million people aged 65 or older in the world in 2021 and the number is expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2050, he said.
The old-age dependency ratio — defined as the number of people aged 65 or older per 100 people aged 20 to 64 — would rise to 1:3.8 from 2021’s 1:6.7, Lin Min-jen said.
This means that the market for long-term care and for helping elderly people would grow immensely, he added.
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